After a judge earlier this month told Paul Allen’s lawyers they had to be more specific in their patent-infringement claims against major tech companies, the Microsoft co-founder on Tuesday refiled the lawsuit. …

The French government might levy a tax on new tablet PCs with more than 40GB storage, but Windows-powered slates would be exempt, according to a report from the French website Numerama (Google translation). Why the special treatment of Microsoft? Because unlike those running Apple’s iOS or Google’s Android operating systems, Windows tablets are full-featured enough to count as computers rather than mobile devices. The tax would be an extension of France’s private-copying policy, which is applied … …

Perhaps the most useful “hack” of Kinect is being developed by researchers from the University of Washington, who have rigged Microsoft’s motion sensor for Xbox 360 to give a surgeon haptic feedback during remote operations. …

The patent-infringement and royalty-rates legal battle between Microsoft and Motorola has now grown to encompass 35 patents. Each company filed new complaints last week: Motorola made claims on two additional patents and Microsoft alleged infringement on seven more. “This week I got the impression,” wrote patent expert Florian Mueller, “that high tech companies — especially if they’re in the smart phone business — now send each other patent suits instead of Christmas cards.” You can read more … …